Archive for the ‘www.serendipit-e.com/mediabloggers’ tag

This is a visual snapshot into the kinds of blog-based publishing projects I design, build, and often, host. One got 2,500 hits in its first 48 hours online. Another was the top link on Sarah Palin’s wikipedia entry at the time she was announced as a vice presidential candidate. An Argentinian warblog has been published as a book. Others get very little traffic, because they are e-books, experimental hypertextual essays, or art projects I’m committed to maintaining as part of our common online Library of Everything. Others are simply labors of love, my own contribution to the “real.”

Not too long ago, someone asked me to predict where interactive media and the Internet would be five years from now. I refused to give an answer, because I don’t get to decide. The beauty of a grassroots, bottom-up social movement like in the Blogosphere is that the social structures provide an organic kind of direction and structure, and the social structure is the authority, not “industry leaders” or “futurists” or any other professional prognosticators striving for control or a first-mover advantage.

Interactivity is about giving up control.

What I strive to do as a designer and a participant in this grassroots social movement is to create tools that empower the most people with enough freedom to set their own directions. I’m not interested in herding cats. I am interested in watching and learning inductively from where cats go.